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TerranauTs T. Coraghessan Boyle
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Ramsay Roothoorp
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hey can call me a corporation man all they want, yet what’s a corporation really but a group of people getting together to advance mankind, and no, we are not and never have been a cult and G.C. is no guru, or not anymore, or he won’t be once we’re inside because once we’re inside nothing’s going to shake us and nothing’s going to make us break open that airlock short of murder and cannibalism, and even that wouldn’t sway me—that would just amount to one more observable phenomenon in the ecology of closed systems. Plus, you’d have to seriously not be paying attention if you didn’t understand that the failure of the first mission and the reason the press turned against it, against us, was exactly that: the breach of the airlock. The whole notion of the ecosphere, of eight people confining themselves willingly in a man-made world for twenty-four months, caught the public’s imagination precisely because of that hook, the conceit of voluntary imprisonment— not to mention the Mars connection. If e2 was supposed to be an experiment in world-building, it was also about business, the kind of potentially remunerative enterprise that enticed a man like Darren Iverson to put up his money in the first place. The earth was running out of resources, global warming was beginning to be recognized as science fact and not science fiction, and if man was to evolve to play a part in things instead of being just another doomed organism on a doomed planet, if the technosphere was going to replace pure biological processes, then sooner or later we’d have to seed life elsewhere—on Mars, to begin with. All right. The public understood that. The press ate it up, feasted on it. e2 was everywhere, from national TV to the New York Times and Time and Newsweek and every talk radio show in existence. And what happened? Within twelve days after closure
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one of the crew—Roberta Brownlow—had a medical emergency, the seals were broken, and the deal was off. She was out in the world, your world (what we like to call e1, the original ecosphere) for less than five hours, but even if it had been five minutes, five seconds, the whole thing would have collapsed. Because it was the conceit that counted, and couldn’t anybody see that? If they were on Mars, she would have died. They all would have died. If not from O2 depletion, then starvation. The fact was, the Mission One crew was to go on to break closure in a panoply of ways during the course of the mission— once the precedent had been set, they all figured why not?— and the public saw through that and labeled the whole thing a sham. Goodbye. Adios. Forget the lessons learned. Forget ecology. Forget modeling and the Intensive Agriculture Biome and the elegant interaction of the wilderness biomes and all the rest. All that mattered was that the crew had broken closure, reneged on a promise, on the deal, and that was laughable, it really was. What did e.O. Wilson say? If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and the failure memorable. Well, he was wrong. There is no forgiveness and there won’t be the next time or the time after that and we weren’t about to make the same mistake. Tell me: what does closure mean? It means closure. Period. The good news was that Mission Control was on board with that, one hundred percent. Of course they were— learn from your mistakes, right? They did a whole lot of fast backpedaling and settled into prophylactic mode, as in let’s anticipate the problems before they arise. They’d made Gretchen Frost have her wisdom teeth removed, and T.T. (Troy Turner) took a course in emergency dentistry, just in case, and we all lauded that. They didn’t go as far maybe as Louis Leakey when he refused to send his ape ladies (or his Trimates, as he called them, Goodall, Galdikas and Fossey) into the jungle if they didn’t agree beforehand to have their appendixes removed by way of foreseeing the unforeseen. Because Leakey, like Wilson, a humanist as well as a scientist, didn’t want to run even the infinitesimal risk of having one of
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them turn septicemic and drop dead on him hundreds of miles from any kind of even semi-acceptable medical intervention. Or the blood supply. Imagine the blood supply back in the sixties and seventies in West Africa and Borneo? Or even now. Now it was worse, far worse, with HIV, AIDS and maybe even ebola pulsing through the circulatory pathways of our criminally expanding species, pandemic, everything a pandemic, apocalypse festering in the blood. But don’t get me started. Mission Control would have liked it if we’d gone under the knife too, I’m sure, but the medical detection these days is far more sophisticated than what it was and they were able to fairly well rule out any signs of incipient appendicitis among the final eight. And, as I said, even if one of us had something catastrophic occur once we were inside—ruptured appendix, gangrene, heart failure—it wouldn’t have made an iota of difference. That would be it. Death was as much a part of natural processes as life, and in strictly Darwinian terms, practical terms, that is, it would be a boon for the other seven. As it was, we’d be hard-pressed to feed ourselves, if the Mission One crew was any indication, and to have one less digestive tract up and working would go a long way toward taking some of the pressure off. I’m talking theoretically here, of course, and strictly in terms of caloric intake—the loss of any of us would be a public relations disaster and an emotional one too, because we were a team and we were dedicated to one another no matter what anybody tells you. There are going to be strains in any enterprise that truly breaks new ground, that’s only to be expected—witness the Russian Bios experiment in which one of the men wound up sexually assaulting one of the women just three months after closure. Actually, since I’ve started down this path, I suppose you can never underestimate people’s appetite for the sensational—if somebody were to die inside, there’s no doubt our public awareness factor would shoot up. Simple as that. Not that it was going to happen, but we were prepared for anything. If the eight of us had stopped short of lacerating our palms and taking a blood oath, we’d made our pact nonetheless. Nothing in, nothing out. That was our mantra.
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Was Roberta Brownlow’s situation unfortunate? Yes, of course it was. And I’m sure you remember the flap over it—furor, really— and how the press came howling after her like hyenas on a scent. Or jackals, I suppose, since hyenas don’t howl, do they? She was Mission One’s MDA, very good-looking, stunning actually, an exemplar of what our species has come to consider prime breeding stock, with a robust figure, abundant hair and teeth like piano keys—the white ones, that is— and she had a way with the press that was just short of flirtatious on the one hand and all business on the other. She was a perfect choice, not simply by way of looks but because she was first-rate at what she did, which, though it involved the least scientific knowledge or discipline, was on some level the most essential function of the crew: to provide food. She wasn’t “Supervisor of Field Crops,” the title that would go to Diane Kesselring on our mission, but the lion’s share of her work went into food production, more than anyone else’s. So she was a fit, Roberta Brownlow, and we were all proud of her. (Yes, we: I came aboard, as most people will know, two months before Mission One closure, putting my head down and working support staff till training started for Mission Two.) But accidents happen. And if you’re timid— afraid, that is, cowardly, trembling like preschoolers scared of their own shadows—you lose your head, and then everything, if you’ll excuse me, goes to shit. Twelve days in. She was in the basement where all our internal support systems are located—the big air handler units, the water treatment tanks, machine shop—feeding rice stalks into the threshing machine with the crew’s medical officer, Winston Barr, whose turn it was to pitch in with the ag work that morning (a lucky break at an unlucky time), when she lost track of what she was doing. The thresher, the same one that’s in place now, has a lower cylinder attached where the hulls are separated from the stems, and she was attempting to clear a blockage there when the roller took hold of her right hand. By the time her scream alerted him and he shut down the machine, the damage had been done. Without thinking, in that instant of shock before the pain hit, Roberta snatched her hand back and when she did a geyser of
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blood erupted from her middle finger, spattering the thresher, the wall behind it, the shirt Winston Barr had just washed and dried the day before. (How do I know that? The shirt detail, that is? He told me. Personally. And I relate it to you because it’s one of those maybe overlooked minor details that underpin the meaning of everything that happens in our lives, from the prosaic to the tragic. And this was tragic. Beyond tragic: it was fatal to the mission.) Two of the other crewmembers, summoned by walkie-talkie while Winston applied pressure and Roberta went from pale to parchment and had to sit heavily on the floor with her head down between her legs, picked through the hulls until they found her severed fingertip so that Winston could sew it back in place. He knew what he was doing. He was dexterous, good with sutures and good with the patient too, but he wasn’t a hand surgeon and the medical lab wasn’t a hospital. Three days later, when the fingertip, which Roberta held up to the visitors’ window for Mission Control and the best hand man in Pima County to examine, turned the color of blood sausage, Mission Control made the call and summoned an ambulance. Which meant breaking closure. Which meant the shitstorm was about to commence. All right. I wouldn’t want to get too critical here, but you can see my point, I’m sure: what’s a fingertip compared to the sanctity of the mission and the vow the crew had made to the world? Nothing. If it were me, I’d have given up all my fingertips, all ten digits—hell, if it came to it, I’d have snipped off my toes too. You think Shackleton worried about appendages? Or Sir edmund Hillary? But you’re not martyrs, people would say. You’re not really on Mars. It isn’t life and death. People would say that—maybe you’re saying it now—but they’d be wrong. A pledge is a pledge: nothing in, nothing out. And that’s just where things spiraled out of control. Roberta Brownlow was outside for just five hours and during that time, while she went to and fro in the ambulance and they cleaned and re-stitched and re-bandaged the wound at the hospital, she’d breathed in no more than something like five thousand lungsful
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of e1 air and consumed exactly one granola bar and a Coke Classic—no lobster Newburg, no caviar, no steak tartare or pigs in a blanket— and yet it didn’t matter. every instant of it was photographed and splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world— and that was just the beginning. When she went back in, when she breached the airlock for the second time, she was carrying two bags with her. Two bags! What was she thinking? What was Mission Control thinking? This was the moon, this was Mars, this was material closure, not some greenhouse you could just stroll in and out of whenever you had the urge, and why not order up a pizza while you’re at it? Pepperoni, anybody? extra cheese? No. The whole thing was a travesty. And what was in those bags—medicine, machine parts, bourbon, a book of crossword puzzles and the latest CD from the King of Pop? Nobody knew. And nobody ever found out, not even me.
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